I think that by now it is widely accepted that Generation X are the last to be raised with any sort of toughness. We didn’t bother with seatbelts or helmets, rode in the back of pick ups and thought nothing of of a six hour bicycle ride halfway across the state. We microwaved all of our meals, watched movies that would make a millennial’s hair stand on end and pumped 2 Live Crew and NWA in our walkmans. Our playgrounds were more dangerous than a modern Navy Seal training course. We made ashtrays in art class and lived in a cloud of second hand smoke. At 10:00 every night a commercial came on television to remind our parents that we existed and that they should probably know where we were. If they didn’t they had no way to find out.
We suffered, we endured, and it built character dammit.
I’m not going to say that there isn’t a little truth to all this nonsense, that there wasn’t a level of self -reliance that maybe a lot of kids nowadays take longer to develop but I also am not going to say that’s necessarily a bad thing. I want my kid to develop the skills that she needs to be an actual grown up but I also want her to be able to stay a kid for as long as it’s possible. I’ve been a grown up for a long time now. It kinda sucks.
I have pretty fond memories of my childhood but I also don’t think it’s unreasonable to think that maybe there are some things that really should be a little different. A lot less of my daughter’s friends seem to have asthma and a lot less of them seem to be walking around in casts than I remember from my childhood.
This seems hard for some people to understand but it’s also a lot hotter now than it was back then. The year that I was in seventh grade the average temperature for the first two weeks of September was 60 degrees, that’s Fahrenheit for my international readers, with a high of 80. This year it averaged 80, with a high of 92. Children don’t sweat as much as the adults making these decisions do. They were literally throwing up and passing out in classrooms.
I understand that a last minute half day really screws up a lot of people when it comes to daycare. It’s not always easy but we are fortunate that we’ve been able to structure our working hours so that one of us is always available. This isn’t a luxury that a lot of people have.
What I don’t understand is the complaints from people who just seem to think that the kids should just suck it up and deal with the heat. The ones that think that because of some suffering or discomfort that they may have once endured all children henceforth should go through the same to reach some arbitrary level of toughness that they need to have. I’m guessing that a lot of these same people are upset that they aren’t able to spank their kids the way that they were spanked as children. In a few months they will be complaining about closures and early releases because of less snow than they once had to travel through to get to school.
A lot of times these sorts of arguments end with “and I turned out fine” but I’m sometimes not so sure about that. If you want other people to have a shitty time just because you did, are you positive you turned out fine? Because you kind of sound like an asshole.
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Previously Published on Thirsty Daddy and is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: iStock
